Given the current state of publishing, I think it helps to have a brand name on the cover of your book. Comedians are proven commodities with built-in audiences. They may not have the writing chops of a Dave Eggers, but they're salacious and funny an...
I really like writing heroes who aren't necessarily 'Hollywood handsome.' Personally, I think men who are self-confident, intelligent, and funny are outrageously attractive - and my heroines tend to think that, too!
I try to write stories that are thrilling and full of mystery and funny all at the same time, stories that raise moral questions but come up with very few moral answers, stories that emotionally touch readers through the characters.
When I decided to write 'The God of Small Things', I had been working in cinema. It was almost a decision to downshift from there. I thought that 300 people would read it. But it created a platform of trust.
I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.
That's what it is every time you walk into the room to write with someone new. It's like, oh god I have to take my clothes off 'my creative clothes' and let them see all of my flaws.
God's revelation has always been in deeds. God's interventions in history have always been in deeds, in actions. Then there are those who interpret the actions, and then there are those who write down the interpretations of the actions.
But I always seem to finish a book and then think, oh God, I've got to pay a tax bill, so I'd better write a novel, so I tend not to stop and learn word processing.
Writing is my therapy. In addition to my real therapy. God knows where I'd be without it. I'd probably still be at my last job, working in HR at a religious organization. I was horribly miscast.
If my writing comes to a halt, I head to the shops: I find them very inspirational. And if I get into real trouble with my plot, I go out for a pizza with my husband.
Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining,...
Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.
At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.
I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading.
Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.
He did once say the time to worry is when they stop writing about you but again I think that was pretty token of the coverage was very respectful, he rather resented the intrusions on his private life, but that was about it.
In real life, I am emotionally confused, which enables me to write songs. I'm a Pisces, and they say that Pisces are very sensitive. If men were just honest with themselves, they would see that they all have that side.
A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
I'm not deciding what the artist is going to write about because it's the artist. They're gonna have to sing that song for the rest of their life. When they're old and they're 80 and they have their show in Vegas, they're gonna have to sing that song...
Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.
